Actor Lindsay Farris is trying to get in touch with his 17-year-old self. ''I know it's in there somewhere,'' he says. ''You can't work on a play like The History Boys without drawing on your own memories of what school was like.''

Farris is preparing for the role of schoolboy provocateur Dakin in a new production of Alan Bennett's multi-award-winning The History Boys, which opens at the Sydney Opera House on February 13. New Zealander Jesse Peach directs the production and it stars John Wood as the eccentric, motorbike-riding teacher Hector.

The school Bennett depicts - a provincial British boys-only grammar school circa 1983 - is a world away from his own education experience, Farris says.

''I used to commute five hours a day from the central coast to Newtown [High School of the Performing Arts]. I had to leave Blue Haven at 4.30am to catch the train. It was a much more eclectic place but I still recognise these boys.

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''They all have this incredible passion for literature and history - the sort of passion we usually see for swimming or football.''

For Farris's cast mate James Mackay, who plays Tom Irwin, an Oxford graduate who has been brought in by the school's headmaster to coach the star group of sixth formers in the tricks of the Oxbridge entrance exams, the world Bennett depicts is much closer to home. ''My entire schooling was at Sydney Grammar, which is very traditional, and based on the English model. There's so much in this play I can relate to.

''I remember I had a teacher who had left school, got his teaching certificate and then came back straight away as a teacher. He really wasn't that much older than us in the scheme of things. Thinking about it now, what a strange thing it must have been for him.

''Obviously, in The History Boys, Irwin is a stranger to the school, but you sense the power struggle between people who are not all that far removed from each other in terms of age and life experience.''

The History Boys also plumbs the sensual and sexual undercurrents of a tempestuous all-male environment. Hector is notorious for touching up students he offers rides to on his motorbike, while Irwin finds himself embroiled in an intellectually and sexually charged relationship with Dakin.

''Dakin is probably the kind of boy Irwin once desperately wished he could have been at school,'' Mackay says. ''Irwin has the mind, he's clever, but Dakin's got the charisma, the masculine confidence.

''But what is really interesting is that the other boys don't react to Hector or to Irwin in the way you assume they might. They don't complain or get strident or outraged. There's a kind of complicity among the group - it all comes under a kind of banner of a love of learning. The question of whether this is OK is left for audience members to grapple with.''